Firefox 30 for Android launched last week with faster load times on 3G connections and accelerated performance thanks to smoothing page panning and CSS3 animations and two major features for developers. Firefox 31 for Android is now in beta.

As reported last week Mozilla has been working on providing more performance improvements to “native experience” for Web apps on Firefox for Android. Using APK Factory, a repackager that was introduced into Firefox 29 Firefox OS app developers can now target millions of Firefox for Android users without changing a line of their apps code. By giving Web apps native updates, native installation and native app management, developers can now provide a more familiar way for users to manage their Web apps. The APK Factory also ensures Web apps use a modern up-to-date runtime, so there is no performance degradation or compatibility issues.

The other noteworthy addition to Firefox 30 for Android is support for Firefox Hub APIs allowing add-on developers to add their own content to the Firefox for Android homepage, providing them with a large area, called a Home Panel, to encourage users to interact with their add-on. Details about building add-ons with the Home.panels API which registers a panel and the HomeProvider API to store data to display are provided documentation on MDN and there's also a collection of experimental add-ons as examples. More on Hub APIs is included in the of Firefox 31 which also has ability to re-order existing panels in about:home as a new feature.

One noted change is the removal of the CAPS infrastructure for specifying site-specific permissions (via capability.policy.* preferences) meaning that attempts to use this functionality to grant access to the clipboard will no longer work. The sole exception is the checkloaduri permission, which may still be used as before to allow sites to load file:// URIs.

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